Vision

“We cannot be scared to learn what we have done to each other, to the planet. Only then can real solutions emerge.”
— Nikki Silvestri, Green For All

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Molded by the values of the Anabaptist and Believer’s Church Tradition that embrace service, justice, tolerance, mutuality, and religious liberty, the JustPax Fund seeks to catalyze economic, environmental and gender justice:

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Economy

JustPax Fund acknowledges that our history of economy is also a history of exploitation, extraction and oppression. While we aspire to the spirit of free exchange to the mutual benefit of all, this has all too rarely been practiced in reality. Those who have been stripped of their agency, their land, their culture or their autonomy cannot be said to be partners in joyous or voluntary exchange. We seek to see and understand the effects of colonialism, racism, violence and commodification in our economic systems.

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Environment

If we have silenced the voices of exploited workers, so too have we marginalized and buried the cries of our nonhuman companions. Our world warms, species vanish, our soils die and slowly we poison ourselves and our neighbors. We have forgotten our role as respectful and reverent stewards and lost our way in an entitled domination and destruction of our only home and once cherished community.

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Gender

We have cultivated an unseeing of those from whom we take economically and environmentally, and also of those we claim to most dearly love. Part of any pursuit of justice must be a reconnection with the wholeness of others, of seeing individuals of any gender as the complete and complex individuals they are — not simply for the roles (traditional, cultural, or biological) in which they might serve us. Any system that tolerates oppression by gender has learned oppression in its most intimate form, invited it into its most sacred spaces, and will not hesitate to broaden those lessons systematically and violently.

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Embodying the Vision

These challenges are spiritual, social, political, practical and personal. They are woven together in an entrenched paradigm that infects every institution, from the religious to the secular. Many of our longest standing cultural artifacts depend on their perpetuation and our corresponding belief that they cannot or should not change. But change they must, and now.

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The JustPax Fund seeks to support projects that offer a new paradigm, a more gracious path forward. We do not come with presumed or prescribed answers, but rather with guiding questions:.

how do we heal these systems of oppression, both in ourselves and in our communities?.

what are the patterns and practices that help us minimize harm? What are those which help us transform it?.

what stories, projects, and models offer us replicable initiatives that can be shared and propagated?.

how can we support and elevate the answers to these questions as they arise from and are championed by the most marginalized?.

what are productive and transformative roles for communities of faith in this transformation?